Twitter use of ‘faggot’ doubles over past year

Twitter, like most forms of communication or entertainment, is roughly 99 percent pure unadulterated shit occasionally peppered with brilliance that rises above the minutia. Think of it this way: there are millions of Twitter users whose usernames include the word "swaggy" in them but only one @PattonOswalt. See what I mean? Sprinkles of genius, buckets of derp.

Unfortunately, the stupidity must be replicating or something, because according to Vocative, in the space of the past year, use of the term faggot has almost doubled. Which can mean only one thing: the stupid have learned how to reproduce via fission. Shit!

June is LGBT Pride Month, so it’s a good opportunity to take stock of the legions of Twitter users who continue to sling homophobic invective with pure, gleeful abandon.

According to numbers gathered by NoHomoPhobes.com, use of the inflammatory word faggot has risen dramatically over the past year, up from approximately 22,000 daily mentions to around 58,000, an increase of about 164 percent. (Small beans compared to the amount of tweets that go out world-wide, perhaps—but not without consequence.)

The funny thing is, most of the instances where the word is used don't really have anything to do with the gay community. "Faggot" has become a catch-all term to describe any kind of annoyance, which is . . . somewhat troubling. Most people seem to use it without the intention of homophobia behind it, but at the same time, it's still a word loaded with anti-gay sentiments. No one really thinks about what they have to say or why they're saying it, so what inevitably comes out is, as I said before, 99 percent pure unadulterated shit.